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Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL

bugs.chromium.org

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Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL

#751
post #43

This and many other changes over a course of a short period of time have caused me to go to Firefox exclusively now. I heard Firefox is going to stop third party cookie tracking altogether. Why not give Google the big finger and use a different browser? Vote with your cold hard actions if you feel so strongly about something.

Firefox does similar things though. They hide the URL scheme by default. And subdomain are displayed in a more subtle colour than the rest of the domain.

Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL

#752
post #43

This and many other changes over a course of a short period of time have caused me to go to Firefox exclusively now. I heard Firefox is going to stop third party cookie tracking altogether. Why not give Google the big finger and use a different browser? Vote with your cold hard actions if you feel so strongly about something.

You should really give the Brave browser from (www.)brave.com a try.

Yes. I've been using Brave exclusively for more than a year and I'm not going back.

I'm still undecided on which search engine to use though.

Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL

#753
post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Austria, we had a rather problematic court ruling regarding this. Following to this and to common recommendations catch-all domains were mostly disabled, at least, you run them at your own risk. What it was about: Say, there was a review or best-price-search site (here, "service.at"), using catch-all and mapping subdomain requests to product searches. So "acme.service.at" would be remapped to, say, "service.a…

Wow, that's particularly deranged if "service.at/search?q=acme" is considered acceptable (and if that 's not, how could any search work?). Thanks for the explanation. I honestly would not have imagined anything like that.

IANAL, and I'm just speculating here, but the law could have been termed as "copyright laws apply to domain names on the internet" (i.e you can't use the name of a brand you don't own in a domain name), and acme.service.at is a domain name, but service.at/search?q=acme is not.

Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL

#754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on. "www." was used as a way of delineating what was a web address. Hence the fashion of putting that there so people knew you had to do it in the browser. Before then people used to also put the " http://" on there, and the combination of the two on vehicles/signs was ridiculous. We're now in a web world. People know what a URL is. "domain.com" isn't ambiguous, it's obvious to man, beast or child that you ty…

There is an actual (small) reason for the existence of "www" nowadays. You cannot have a CNAME record for the domain apex (example.com). Many dns providers implement a workaround by resolving the CNAME record into A/AAAA records when queried. https://serverfault.com/questions/613829/why-cant-a-cname-re...

You can but it prevents you from having other records there, which includes things like an MX record. Just a nitpick, as in practice that prevents most people from being able to use a CNAME on the apex.

Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL

#755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on. "www." was used as a way of delineating what was a web address. Hence the fashion of putting that there so people knew you had to do it in the browser. Before then people used to also put the " http://" on there, and the combination of the two on vehicles/signs was ridiculous. We're now in a web world. People know what a URL is. "domain.com" isn't ambiguous, it's obvious to man, beast or child that you ty…

Ahem. "www" comes from the times, when you had to have a dedicated machine, or, at least, a dedicated network interface, for each service. Hence, you had an FTP server, creatively named "ftp", and your WWW service ran on a host surprisingly named "www". A concept similar to well-known addresses.

That time has never existed. Some did separate things that way, many did not.

Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL

#756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is actually the main reason I cannot use Safari. It always boggled my mind that they made this decision. For power users, they never look at the url unless they want information from it, in which case the `www` is valuable. For low tech users, it can lead to straight up incomprehensible issues, like sites not rendering properly (think of a `m.*`). The UI gains are so small, that part of the screen is never reall…

Low-tech users don’t often understand that a difference could possibly exist between “m.” and “www.” at all. However, if it shows the TLD, they can confirm it says “google.com”. Imagine they’re visiting a Paypal phishing link, to the domain: www.paypal.com.www.com The most important thing to show the user is “www.com”, because they’re expecting “paypal.com”. All the rest is nonessential for protecting users from bad…

Looking at the bug report, Chrome would actually show "www.paypal.com.www.com" as "paypal.com.com". At least Safari does the wrong thing the right way.

Personally, I always want to see the full URL. It's fine if part of the domain, the scheme etc. are grayed out to emphasize the second and top level domains, but don't omit elements that are necessary to fully identify the resource because the lowest common denominator may think that fishing.com/paypal.com is paypal.

Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL

#757
post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't care about the location bar. Everytime they want to use Facebook, they type 'facebook' or maybe 'facebook login' in the location/search bar. And to get to their gmail account they might type their own email address in the location bar.

Ehh this might have been true 10+ years ago, but most people are more savvy than that today.. I think you are describing something that is less and less common (which may explain why Google is trying to encourage people to keep doing it).

Yahoo Search still shows a second search box under the first search result if you search for Google, to capture users that search for Google then type in their actual search term, even when they're already on a search engine.

They may not make up a huge proportion of users, but they still make up a huge number of people in actual terms.

Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL

#758

Looks like this is intentional. To change it back go to chrome://flags/#omnibox-ui-hide-steady-state-url-scheme-and-subdomains and disable the setting.

Hopefully an upside to user tracking means using this flag is kind of voting on the behaviour. If they're listening.

Re: Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL

#759

Those who are saying this change is to make things "easier" for certain non-literate users may be correct, but they should consider whether such a justification is desirable at all from a moral perspective. No doubt all of us have at some point been forced to learn things that we did not find particularly useful or pleasant to learn at the time, but then later experienced a great "satisfaction of knowledge" when face…

Some of my comments from 4 years ago when Chrome hiding URLs was just an "experiment":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694919

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